Green Thumb Glut

A Profusion Of Television Shows Cultivates Gardening Enthusiasts

April 18, 1998|By Carol Stocker, New York Times News Service.

Russ Morash of WGBH-TV, often called the founding father of how-to television, launched the "The Victory Garden" back in 1975 in Boston. For 23 years Morash has pretty much had the field of garden television to himself, winning a national viewership along the way.

But suddenly other gardening spots are popping up on TV like mushrooms after a rain. What's happening?

Robin Young, a cohost for the Discovery Channel's "Home Matters" how-to show, can think of two things: "Baby boomers want to cocoon with cozy, warm programming, and at the same time there's the biggest media revolution since the advent of television and everyone's scrambling."

The rush is on to see who can take garden TV into the millennium. And coming up: a new era when computers may replace television, when you may be able to call up, on demand, a documentary on how to reseed your lawn, starring your favorite garden TV host.

Garden television fits neatly into this new order. "It suits the economics of cable TV because it's dirt cheap to produce," said commentator and critic Steven Stark. "And it provides a small but well-heeled and committed target audience for advertisers, which is perfect for cable."

"Twenty years ago there were only three or four viewing choices on television, so each had to be more general, and home and garden shows were tucked away at odd times. Now with 50 channels to fill, we have `narrowcasting' instead of `broadcasting,"' said Alex McNeil, author of "Total Television."

"The industry joke is that the new spinoff of the Weather Channel will be the Humidity Channel, for people who just want to know the humidity."

But gardening doesn't change like the weather. This makes it a prime candidate for both cable and Internet immortality. Garden shows can be broadcast in an endless loop. Audrey Hepburn materializes each year to escort us through the "Gardens of the World" on Home & Garden Television; the series consists of only eight programs.

Even better, gardening how-to information can be collected, stockpiled, and sold ad infinitum over the Internet or through some future technology. What that technology will be remains to be seen, but there's a tremendous sense of anticipation in the air.

"Garden shows will all probably end up on CD-ROMs and the Internet and you'll be able to retrieve the information on your computer when you want it," speculated Sid Levin, owner of First Frame, a Concord television production company that films many of the Discovery Channel's "Home Matters" garden segments. "Want to learn how to plant bulbs? There it is."

Martha Stewart

Martha Stewart is thinking along these lines. Her syndicated "Martha Stewart Living" program, which has 3 million viewers, stepped up production from a weekly to daily basis last fall and is rapidly compiling a video library.

"Our shows are very expensive to produce, far more than other how-to shows," said Stewart, in a phone interview from her hair stylist's in New York. Her shows cost $55,000 to $65,000 apiece, she said. (By comparison, Home & Garden Television programs cost $8,000 to $27,000 an episode.)

"Our shows are so superior to the others. In the quality of material, the lighting and camera work -- we usually use four cameras instead of one. There's tremendous preparation and planning," said Stewart. "We'll start a segment one year and finish it the next year if we have to.

"The reason I want to spend so much money is because I'm compiling a library of correct procedures for gardening and home projects that can be available through computers in the information age," she said.

"That's why we have no repetitive programming." In other words, while "The Victory Garden" may film a sequence on how to plant peas every few years, "Martha Stewart Living" will film it only once.

Last fall, Stewart's company launched a Web site (www.marthastewart.com) that contains instructions for her projects on the television show and a host of other features, including a video clip that can be downloaded to preview the next day's show by means of video-compression technology.

`Rebecca's Garden'

This is a Martha Stewart clone starring a twinkly Minnesota-based meteorologist who adds a pinch of Garrison Keillor flavoring to the Stewart TV recipe.

"Any resemblance in delivery is purely coincidental," maintains the show's producer, Bruce Marson of Channel 5 in Boston, but, like Martha Stewart, Rebecca Kolls is being marketed as a celebrity brand name. In fact the whole project, launched by Gil Maurer, the garden-loving CEO of Hearst-Argyle Television, was dependent upon finding a suitably charismatic host. Kolls was discovered doing the weather in Minneapolis, where weather is such big (and usually bad) news that meteorologists are stars. In fact, her local station had built her a rooftop garden from which to give her reports so she could excite spring-starved viewers with promises of sunflowers and tomatoes to come.